Reading for meaning: the effects of Developmental Education on reading achievements of primary school students from low SES and ethnic minority families

ABSTRACT

The appropriateness of innovative educational concepts for students from a low socioeconomic status (SES) or ethnic minority background is sometimes called into question. Disadvantaged students are supposed to benefit more from traditional approaches with Programmatic Instruction (PI). We examined Developmental Education (DE), an innovative approach, inspired by Vygotskian theory, in which reading skills are developed through meaningful reading of texts corresponding to students’ self-generated problems. The effectiveness of DE is compared to PI in terms of reading comprehension, strategy knowledge, and reading motivation of 4th-grade students; 170 students from ethnic minority or low SES background participated in a pretest-posttest natural 2-group design. Outcomes were similar in both approaches, with one exception: Students with an ethnic minority background in DE performed better on strategy knowledge than similar students in PI. These results are discussed in relation to previous studies on the appropriateness of innovative curricula for disadvantaged students.

KEYWORDS:

• Reading comprehension
• Developmental Education
• reading for meaning
• disadvantaged students

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In SPSS, two estimation methods are available: restricted maximum likelihood (RML) and ML. The latter estimation method is preferable when comparing the fit indices (–2 log likelihood) of two models that differ only in the numbers of fixed-effect parameters, as was the case in the present study.

2. These categories overlap; 47 students were from both ethnic minority and low SES families.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yvonne van Rijk

Yvonne van Rijk is a teacher trainer and researcher at the Faculty of Education at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her interests focus on language acquisition and education from a sociocultural perspective. She is writing a dissertation on the teaching of meaningful reading in primary education.

Langha de Mey

Langha de Mey is an assistant professor in Methodology at the Department of Research and Theory of Education at VU University Amsterdam. His research focus is on quantitative methodology and data analysis.

Dorian de Haan

Dorian de Haan is a professor in Developmental Education at the Inholland University of Applied Sciences and an assistant professor at the Department of Developmental Psychology at Utrecht University. Her research focus is on language acquisition and education in multi-ethnic institutions of childcare and primary school.

Bert van Oers

Bert van Oers is a professor in Cultural-Historical Theory of Education at VU University Amsterdam (Faculty Psychology and Education). Since the 1980s, he has been involved in the elaboration, implementation, and evaluation of the Developmental Education Concept in The Netherlands. His main topics and publications are related to this project.

Monique Volman

Monique Volman is Full Professor of Education and Director of the “Educational Sciences” program at the Research Institute of Child Development and Education of the University of Amsterdam. Main areas in her research are learning environments for meaningful learning, diversity, and the use of ICT in education.